Category Archives: LED Manufacturing

LED Taiwan will be held at TWTC Nangang Exhibition Hall in Taipei on April 13-16. As the LED market stabilizes, companies in the industry continue to invest in technology R&D as part of their efforts to stand out amid a pricing war of end products. In line with current key issues in the industry, this year’s LED Taiwan will feature five theme pavilions, several industry forums and the TechSTAGE. The Taiwan International Lighting Show (TiLS) will be co-located; with 700 booths, the exhibitions and conferences expect to attract over 20,000 visitors.

Research firm LEDinside estimated that the value of the global high-brightness LED market will increase three percent year-over-year in 2016. Despite the modest outlook, prospects still look good for niche applications in IR LED or UV LED, and may even become the main growth driver in the market. In LED lighting, the market reached US$25.7 billion of revenue in 2015 with a penetration rate at 31 percent. The numbers are expected to increase to $30.5 billion and 36 percent, respectively, in 2016.

LED Taiwan is made possible with collaboration and resources from SEMI, TAITRA, the Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Association and the Taiwan Optoelectronic Semiconductor Industry Association. Each year, foreign buyers and leading manufacturers are invited to the exposition where various business matching events, forums and meetings are arranged to help Taiwan vendors expand connections and secure business opportunities by interacting with the elite members of foreign industrial and academic circles.

In addition to the existing pavilions (High-Brightness LED and Sapphire), LED Taiwan 2016 expands three more pavilions (LED Components, Smart Lighting Technology and Power Devices) and also invited international leading companies: Aurora Optoelectronics, Cree, Epileds, Epistar, Lextar, MLS, and Rubicon to demonstrate on show floor to help visitors explore the latest moves and trends in the market to increase their global competitiveness.

To enable innovation and bring more energy to the local LED industry, TechSTAGE will be held as part of this year’s LED Taiwan event, showcasing the Taiwan LED R&D capability in the areas of LED Manufacturing Equipment & Materials, Power Device Technology, Sapphire Processing Technology & Application, LED Advanced Technologies, and Smart Lighting & Automobile Lighting. For more information on LED Taiwan, please visit: www.ledtaiwan.org/en/ (English) or www.ledtaiwan.org/zh/.

Veeco Instruments Inc., a supplier of metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) systems, announced today that it has signed a joint development project (JDP) agreement with imec, the Belgium-based nano-electronics research center. The collaboration is expected to accelerate the development of highly-efficient, Gallium Nitride (GaN) based, power electronic devices using GaN Epi wafers created using Veeco’s Propel Power GaN MOCVD system.

Imec has already demonstrated significant gains in GaN layer uniformity and run-to-run repeatability with Veeco’s Propel system, resulting in significantly improved power device yields. The single wafer reactor incorporates Veeco’s proprietary TurboDisc technology that delivers superior film uniformity, run-to-run control and defect levels compared to batch reactors.

“Within the framework of our industrial affiliation program on GaN-on-Si, Veeco and imec have collaborated over the last four years to improve the Epi quality of GaN layers deposited on silicon wafer substrates,” said Rudi Cartuyvels, Senior Vice President Smart Systems and Energy Technologies at imec. “The ultimate goal is to produce the next generation of highly efficient power switching devices. We have set very high GaN device yield and reliability targets for 2016 and we look forward to partnering with Veeco to achieve these targets.”

According to IHS research, industry requirements are growing and requiring smaller, more energy efficient power ICs. This, in turn, is driving the need for improved power devices using advanced materials. GaN-on-Si coupled with improved process solutions, such as single-wafer GaN MOCVD, are critical to the development of these improved power devices.

“We are very pleased with our imec collaboration,” said Jim Jenson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Veeco MOCVD Operations. “Global demand for advanced power electronics with greater energy efficiency, a smaller form factor and greater reliability is rapidly accelerating. We believe that the technology in our Propel single wafer system will enable imec to achieve their power device targets and help to bring these advanced devices to market faster.”

Ultratech, Inc., a supplier of lithography, laser processing and inspection systems used to manufacture semiconductor devices and high­brightness LEDs (HB­ LEDs), as well as atomic layer deposition (ALD) systems, announced the promotion of two of its executives. Tammy D. Landon, Senior Vice President of Operations, and Dave Ghosh, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Service, have been promoted to be executive officers at Ultratech. These promotions are an example of the company’s ongoing leadership succession process and efforts to cultivate top industry talent at Ultratech.

Ultratech Chairman and CEO Arthur W. Zafiropoulo, who remains the company’s principal operating officer said, “I congratulate both Tammy and Dave as they are both deserving of their respective promotions.  Tammy joined Ultratech in 2000, and her level of leadership and expertise have earned her the role of executive officer.  For this executive officer position, Dave will be leveraging his experience from the various responsibilities he has had at Ultratech since 1989.  Healthy companies both retain top talent and implement leadership plans as a means to remain competitive. Tammy and Dave each have over 30 years of industry experience, and these promotions are a part of the management process for Ultratech.  I have every confidence that Tammy and Dave will be successful in their new roles as executive officers, and I look forward to their continued contributions to Ultratech.”

Tammy D. Landon, Senior Vice President of Operations, Ultratech, Inc.
Landon joined Ultratech in 2000.  During this time, she had multiple responsibilities that included manufacturing, operations, materials, engineering, quality, training, technical support and installations. More recently, Landon has led the human resources, information technology and corporate services within the company. Her background includes more than 30 years of manufacturing, project management and engineering positions in the semiconductor and defense industries. Landon has a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry as well as a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Dave Ghosh, Senior Vice President Global Sales and Service, Ultratech, Inc.
Since 1989, Ghosh has served Ultratech in various capacities and has been responsible for risk management, corporate services, real estate, facilities, environment, health and safety, human resources, information technology systems and worldwide service. In addition, he works with the CEO on special projects that include M&A activities, initiating and negotiating with foreign governments for business development and risk management. His experience spans over 30 years in a variety of operations and service positions. Ghosh earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial technology from San Jose State University.

Semiconductor equipment manufacturer ClassOne Technology announced the purchase of its Solstice S8 electroplating system by one of the world’s leading LED manufacturers.

“The unique flexibility and process control of the Solstice electroplating system were particularly important factors in addressing this customer’s needs,” said Kevin Witt, Chief Technology Officer of ClassOne Technology. “The fully-automated 8-chamber Solstice gives users the ability to process multiple wafer sizes at the same time on a single tool. ClassOne’s distinctive design allows the chambers to be changed very quickly and easily. In addition, Solstice can provide a high degree of whole-process control, enabling close monitoring of such parameters as film stress.”

“ClassOne’s level of support for the tool in Europe was another significant factor in making the sale,” said Byron Exarcos, President of ClassOne Technology. “At this installation we will be providing not only product service but also ongoing process development assistance. We’re proud that Solstice was selected to help produce some of the most advanced next-generation LED products on the planet.”

Solstice systems are designed to provide high-performance electroplating on ≤200mm wafers at a very reasonable cost. Because of their superior performance/price ratio — as well as their ability to handle smaller substrates — Solstice plating tools have become very popular in emerging markets such as LED, MEMS, RF, power, and sensors. ClassOne’s electroplaters allow users to deposit a broad range of metals and alloys on both opaque and transparent substrates. The Solstice systems are available in fully-automated, 75-wph, 4- and 8-chamber configurations — as well as a smaller, semi-automated tool for process development.

The global value of quantum dot markets was $306 million USD in 2014 and is expected at $4.6 billion USD over the forecast period due to the subsequent generation device, display, and system activated by quantum dot, according to a new report released this week by Radiant Insights. Semiconductor revolution is represented by quantum dots which provide complicated functions on the bases of nanoparticles shape. A verity of devices can be made with low-cost due to easy manipulation of the material.

Quantum Dot & Quantum Dot LED market sectors are solar, HDTV 7 displays, ID tags, LED lighting, cancer imaging, telco lasers, and personalized medicine. All sectors are expected to attain amazing expansion, with solar market and TV display technology getting more than $1 billion USD in profits annually by 2021. Qdot cancer imaging attains $750 million USD & quantum dot ID Tags reach $700 million USD over the forecast period.

Quantum dot market is growing rapidly. Technology maturity force is the key drive to the market. Solar quantum dots, fuel cell catalysts, TV displays, and a variety of applications depend on the aptitude to quantum dot time to time in enough amount needed for commercial purpose. One of the foremost applications of quantum dots commercially was the display of large screens and is proven to be a very good market.

SEMICON Korea 2016 at COEX in Seoul opens tomorrow with more than 540 exhibiting companies and an expected 40,000 attendees. Today’s SEMICON Korea press conference expressed a positive lookout, for both 2016 and for longer-term growth drivers, like the Internet of Things (IoT).

Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI, reported at the Press Conference that even with slightly decreased annual spending, Korea is expected to remain the second largest equipment market for the second year in a row. In 2014, the materials market in Korea surpassed Japan to become the second largest materials market after Taiwan. This year, we expect Korea to represent about a $7.3 billion market, representing 16 percent of the world materials market.

Much of the semiconductor manufacturing capacity in Korea is targeted towards both advanced NAND Flash and DRAM. Korea represents the largest region of installed 300mm fab capacity in the world. Korean semiconductor manufacturers represent about 60 percent of the worldwide Memory output, and is the market leader for installed Memory fab capacity.  According to the SEMI World Fab Forecast, memory was a significant driver for semiconductor equipment spending in 2015 and is expected to remain the largest spending segment 2016, driven mainly by investments for 3D NAND. The primary driver for the Memory market continues to be mobility, keeping the pressure on scaling and added functionality.

Korea fab equipment spending (front-end) in 2016 is forecast to be US$ 8.1 billion. The combined equipment and materials spending outlook for Korea in 2016 will likely top $15.3 billion. The semiconductor, semiconductor equipment, and materials supply chain in Korea is increasingly deep and broad and filling out as a complete ecosystem.

In addition, the LED market will experience strong double-digit growth in lighting applications over the next several years. Overall LED fab capacity continues to expand, and many manufacturers are transitioning to manufacturing with 4-inch diameter sapphire wafers. Korean manufacturers are prominently positioned in the global LED rankings.

Tomorrow’s keynotes at SEMICON Korea will be presented by AUDI, Synopsys, and Texas Instruments. Highlights include: Semiconductor Technology Symposium which addresses the global trends and new technologies of the semiconductor manufacturing process; Market Seminar; Supplier Search Program; OEM Supplier Search Meeting; Presidents Reception; and International Standards meetings.

SEMICON Korea 2016 is a semiconductor technology event for market trends and breaking technology developments, featuring deep technical forums, business programs and standards activities.

Sponsors of SEMICON Korea 2016 include: Special sponsors Samsung, SK Hynix, and Dongbu HiTek; Platinum sponsors Lam Research, Applied Materials, Wonik, Exicon, ASE Group, Advantest, EO Technics, and TEL; and Gold sponsors Hitachi High-Tech and PSK.

The event is co-located with LED Korea 2016.  For more information on the events, visit SEMICON Korea: www.semiconkorea.org/en/  and LED Korea: www.led-korea.org/en/.

Making tiny switches do enormous jobs in a more efficient way than current technology allows is one of the goals of a research team led by Cornell engineering professor Huili (Grace) Xing.

Xing and her group – which includes her husband, Debdeep Jena, also an engineering professor at Cornell – have created gallium nitride (GaN) power diodes capable of serving as the building blocks for future GaN power switches. The group built a GaN power-switching device, approximately one-fifth the width of a human hair, that could support 2,000 volts of electricity.

With silicon-based semiconductors rapidly approaching their performance limits in electronics, GaN is seen as the next generation in power control and conversion. Applications span nearly all electronics products and electricity distribution infrastructure.

“With some of these new materials, it’s actually conceivable now to shrink medium-scale power-distribution systems onto a chip,” Jena said. “Looking into the future, this is one of the goals, and it’s not a moonshot. It’s possible, but the materials have to be right, the design has to be right.”

The team’s work was published Dec. 15 in the journal Applied Physics Letters, a publication of the American Institute of Physics. The group includes researchers from Cornell, the University of Notre Dame – from where Xing and Jena arrived at Cornell last year – and the semiconductor company IQE.

Xing said the key to her team’s discovery was building the device on a GaN base layer that contained relatively few energy-sapping defects, in comparison to traditional silicon-based substrates.

“We’re going to take the defects, some of them anyway, out of the equation,” said Xing, the Richard Lundquist Sesquicentennial Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering. “Nothing can be 100 percent [free of defects], but we’re talking about improvements along an order of magnitude of up to 10,000 times.”

The team used a couple of indicators to determine the defect level in the GaN diode, including “diode ideality factor” as measured by the Shockley-Read-Hall recombination lifetime. The SRH lifetime is the average time it takes positively and negatively charged particles to move around before recombining at defects, which creates inefficiency.

The team’s work yielded near-ideal performance in all aspects, spawning hope for the future of GaN power diodes.

“Our results are an important step toward understanding the intrinsic properties and the true potential of GaN,” said Zongyang Hu, a Cornell postdoctoral associate and the paper’s co-lead author.

While much of energy-related research and development is focused on alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar, the Xing team’s efforts in power transmission are just as important, Jena said.

“Power generation gets a lot of press, and it should,” he said. “But once the power is generated, the amount of power that is lost because of inefficiencies is mind-bogglingly large. This problem is about conservation rather than generating power, which is really the same thing.

“And the scale of losses today actually far surpasses the total of renewable energies combined,” he said. “And it’s a clear and present solution; it’s not like we have to discover something fundamental.”

The team’s work is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) “SWITCHES” program. SWITCHES stands for Strategies for Wide Bandgap, Inexpensive Transistors for Controlling High-Efficiency Systems.

“Leading one of these projects, we at Cornell – in collaboration with our industrial partners – have established an integrated plan to develop three terminal GaN power transistors, package them, and insert them into circuits and products,” Xing said.

The team’s paper is titled “Near unity ideality factor and Shockley-Read-Hall lifetime in GaN-on-GaN p-n diodes with avalanche breakdown.” Cornell collaborators included Kazuki Nomoto and Vladimir Protasenko, research associates in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and graduate students Bo Song and Mingda Zhu. The team also included Jena’s Ph.D. student Meng Qi at the University of Notre Dame, and engineers Ming Pan and Xiang Gao of IQE.

UK-based chipmaker Dialog Semiconductor plc’s board of directors has determined not to revise its proposal to acquire US-based microcontroller and touch solutions specialist Atmel Corp., the company said.

On 13 January 2016, Atmel published that it had determined that the unsolicited acquisition proposal received from Microchip Technology Inc. constitutes a “company Superior Proposal” and that it intends to terminate its merger agreement with Dialog to accept Microchip’s proposal. Dialog will inform Atmel that it will waive the remainder of the four business day notice period to which Dialog is entitled under its merger agreement with Atmel.

Upon termination of the merger agreement by Atmel to accept Microchip’s proposal, Atmel is required to pay Dialog a $137.3M termination fee.

Dialog provides highly integrated standard and custom mixed-signal integrated circuits, optimised for smartphone, tablet, IoT, LED Solid State Lighting and Smart Home applications.

Scientists from Germany and Spain have discovered a way to create a BioLED by packaging luminescent proteins in the form of rubber. This innovative device gives off a white light which is created by equal parts of blue, green and red rubber layers covering one LED, thus rendering the same effect as with traditional inorganic LEDs but at a lower cost.

Increasingly popular LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, are the light of choice for the European Union and the United States when it comes to creating lighting devices of the future. This preference can be attributed to the fact that LEDs are more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs and more stable than energy-efficient light bulbs.

Despite their advantages, however, LEDs are manufactured using inorganic materials that are in short supply -such as cerium and yttrium-, thus meaning that they are more expensive and difficult to sustain in the long run. Additionally, white LEDs produce a colour that is not optimal for eyesight since they lack a red component that can psychologically affect individuals exposed to them for long periods of time.

Now, however, a German-Spanish team of scientists has drawn inspiration from nature’s biomolecules in search of a solution. Their technique consists in introducing luminescent proteins into a polymer matrix to produce luminescent rubber. This technique involves a new way of packaging proteins which could end up substituting the technique used to create LEDs today.

“We have developed a technology and a hybrid device called BioLED that uses luminescent proteins to convert the blue light emitted by a ‘normal’ LED into pure white light”, explains Rubén D. Costa to Sinc, a researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany) and co-author of the study.

It is always necessary to have either a blue or an ultraviolet LED to excite the rubbers that are put over the LED in order to make it white. In other words, we can combine blue LED/green rubber/red rubber, or ultraviolet LED/blue rubber/green rubber/red rubber. The result is the first BioLED that gives off a pure white light created by similar parts of the colours blue, green and red, all while maintaining the efficiency offered by inorganic LEDs.

The authors clear up that the blue or ultraviolet LEDs are much cheaper than white ones, which are made of an expensive and scarce material known as YAG:Ce (Cerium-doped Yttrium Aluminium Garnet). The idea is replace it by proteins.

“The Bio-LEDs are simple to manufacture and their materials are low-cost and biodegradable, meaning that they can easily be recycled and replaced”, points out Costa, while also highlighting the high stability of these proteins that have “luminescent properties that remain intact during the months of storage under different environmental conditions of light, temperature and humidity”.

In fact, with this technique “we have been able to achieve a sustained use of proteins in optoelectronic devices with an excellent stability for the first time, something that had not happened in the last 50 years. This thus represents a major breakthrough in this field,” stresses Pedro B. Coto, another one of the authors who also conducts research at this German university.

Scientists are already working on optimising this new elastic material in order to achieve greater thermal stability and an even longer operating lifetime. They are addressing how to optimise the chemical composition of the polymer matrix in addition to using proteins that are increasingly more resistant to device operating conditions. The goal is to make this new BioLED more accessible on an industrial scale in the not too distant future.

Use of copper as a fluorescent material allows for the manufacture of inexpensive and environmentally compatible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Thermally activated delayed fuorescence (TADF) ensures high light yield. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), CYNORA, and the University of St Andrews have now measured the underlying quantum mechanics phenomenon of intersystem crossing in a copper complex. The results of this fundamental work are reported in the Science Advances journal and contribute to enhancing the energy efficiency of OLEDs.

Organic light-emitting diodes are deemed tomorrow’s source of light. They homogeneously emit light in all observation directions and produce brilliant colors and high contrasts. As it is also possible to manufacture transparent and flexible OLEDs, new application and design options result, such as flat light sources on window panes or displays that can be rolled up. OLEDs consist of ultra-thin layers of organic materials, which serve as emitter and are located between two electrodes. When voltage is applied, electrons from the cathode and holes (positive charges) from the anode are injected into the emitter, where they form electron-hole pairs. These so-called excitons are quasiparticles in the excited state. When they decay into their initial state again, they release energy.

Excitons may assume two different states: Singlet excitons decay immediately and emit light, whereas triplet excitons release their energy in the form of heat. Usually, 25 percent singlets and 75 percent triplets are encountered in OLEDs. To enhance energy efficiency of an OLED, also triplet excitons have to be used to generate light. In conventional light-emitting diodes heavy metals, such as iridium and platinum, are added for this purpose. But these materials are expensive, have a limited availability, and require complex OLED production methods.

It is cheaper and environmentally more compatible to use copper complexes as emitter materials. Thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) ensures high light yields and, hence, high efficiency: Triplet excitons are transformed into singlet excitons which then emit photons. TADF is based on the quantum mechanics phenomenon of intersystem crossing (ISC), a transition from one electronic excitation state to another one of changed multiplicity, i.e. from singlet to triplet or vice versa. In organic molecules, this process is determined by spin-orbit coupling. This is the interaction of the orbital angular momentum of an electron in an atom with the spin of the electron. In this way, all excitons, triplets and singlets, can be used for the generation of light. With TADF, copper luminescent material reaches an efficiency of 100 percent.

Stefan Bräse and Larissa Bergmann of KIT’s Institute of Organic Chemistry (IOC), in cooperation with researchers of the OLED technology company CYNORA and the University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, for the first time measured the speed of intersystem crossing in a highly luminescent, thermally activated delayed fluorescence copper(I) complex in the solid state. The results are reported in the Science Advances journal. The scientists determined a time constant of intersystem crossing from singlet to triplet of 27 picoseconds (27 trillionths of a second). The reverse process – reverse intersystem crossing – from triplet to singlet is slower and leads to a TADF lasting for an average of 11.5 microseconds. These measurements improve the understanding of mechanisms leading to TADF and facilitate the specific development of TADF materials for energy-efficient OLEDs.